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We're talking to Steve Byrne about the Freep Film Festival 2017.

Now, Steve, how long has the festival been going on?

Hard to believe, but this is actually going to be our fourth edition this year.

Yeah, it's crazy to me thinking about it because I go back to, you know, now five, five and a half years ago, and we were bouncing around the idea of the free press of doing it,

and that doesn't feel very long ago at all. And at that time, it was very much in doubt whether we

would or wouldn't. It's crazy to me to think about those conversations being now pretty long time

ago that this thing has really kind of come to fruition in the way that we envisioned it.

Now, Freep Film Festival for folks that don't know, boy, that's a lot of Fs in that sentence.

Just so people can kind of get their hands wrapped around this, mostly dealing, if not exclusively,

dealing with documentary films.

That is correct. We definitely consider ourselves a documentary-focused festivals. We've made a couple of exceptions over our four years for narratives that were really super strongly connected to Detroit,

and we thought had something to say. But this year we have one extended, what I guess I call

it an extended link short, that's kind of a docie drama. But we don't have any pure fictional

films at all. Everything else is docs. Documentary has definitely seen a renaissance over the last,

gosh, almost 20 years now, it seems like. And really, part of that I would say would go back to

one of our hometown boys, Michael Moore, with Roger and me. It seems like. And really, part of that, I would say, would go back to one of our hometown boys, Michael

Moore, with Roger and me. It seems like, to me, at least that seemed like popularized documentaries.

And then since then, it just has been off the hook. Obviously, I think Michael, what he did was

show that there's commercial potential in documentaries, which was a genre,

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